Out of Time

I see by the clock on my wall that the clock on the wall no longer works. It's an old Seiko battery powered analog clock with a decorative pendulum, made to look like some sort of traditional wall clock. It has a choice of chimes which are electronically produced, and fortunately also has the option of turning them off altogether, which I did years ago. For the last couple of years the hands have been somewhat at odds with one another. When the hour hand showed up on the hour, the minute hand still had ten or fifteen minutes to go. Saturday night when I went to reset the clock back to standard time, the minute hand disengaged itself and flopped about like a skateboarder's broken arm on one of those clip shows.

So I no longer have a clock in the living room. I do have the digital clock on the cable box, but that won't work if the power (or the cable) goes out. There are a couple of other battery powered clocks around the house, and I suppose I could move one of them into the living room, but none of them are very good at keeping time, either. I don't know when I'll have the spare cash to replace the clock. Hopefully it can be done before the next power (or cable) outage. In the meantime, I'll probably keep looking at the dead wall clock to see what time it is, and the clock will lie to me. Maybe I'll just take it down so I won't get fooled. I really don't like having that clean spot on the wall, though.

Ah, well. Everything is falling apart around here, including me, so I guess I can learn to live with one more broken item. And my schedule is so irregular any more that being mistaken about the time now and then probably won't have much of an effect on my life. But I think I'll miss seeing that little, non-functional pendulum swing.